It’s a Friday night in the South Carolina suburbs, late in the 1980s, and Jenny and Emily have a pile of VHS tapes fresh from the video store: “A Stranger Is Watching,” “Bloody Birthday,” “Dead Ringers” and more. For horror fans, this is slice-and-dice nirvana.

Jenny and Emily are 14-year-olds, as curious and convinced of their invincibility as any ninth graders. What happens to the women in slasher films has nothing in common with their own sunny, churchgoing lives. Or does it?

Starring Abigail Breslin as Jenny, Erica Schmidt’s “All the Fine Boys” is a not-quite-coming-of-age tale — part romantic comedy, part thriller, with a little bit of an indie-drama vibe. Directed by Ms. Schmidt for the New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the play follows the two friends as they pursue their respective romantic quests: Jenny with Joseph (Joe Tippett), a handsome man twice her age; and Emily (a thoughtful Isabelle Fuhrman) with Adam (Alex Wolff), a high school senior.

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Alex Wolff and Isabelle Fuhrman in “All the Fine Boys.”CreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Why Emily would be into Adam, who writes poetry and edits a literary magazine, is a mystery to Jenny. “He’s not like Bubba or Dick or Kevin or any of the fine boys,” she says.

It’s the kind of line that would sound just right if Jenny — who has lived in this town all her life and can describe in some detail a local festival devoted to okra — had even a hint of a Southern accent. In Ms. Breslin’s self-conscious, underdeveloped performance, she does not.

Lately of the Fox horror spoof “Scream Queens,” Ms. Breslin was 10 when she got an Oscar nomination for playing the precocious Olive in “Little Miss Sunshine.” At 20, she still comes across as older than her years, so casting her to portray a 14-year-old is a puzzling decision — one that knocks the production badly out of kilter. The cumulative impact of the play hinges on Jenny, so it is no small thing that she never seems real.

Mr. Tippett nonetheless gives a nice performance as Joseph, whose predatory creepiness is abundantly apparent even if Jenny is too naïvely smitten to sense danger. When she loses her virginity to him, though, she does register surprise — at the banality of the experience. “That’s it?” she asks afterward. “That’s really it?”

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Abigail Breslin and Joe Tippett in a scene from Erica Schmidt's play at the Pershing Square Signature Center.Published OnMarch 3, 2017

The play is smarter and more deliberate on the page than it seems in this world-premiere production. Onstage in the intimate Ford Foundation Studio Theater, it comes fully alive only in the beautifully drawn scenes between Emily and Adam, an adolescent philosopher in vibrant intellectual and creative bloom. “Recently, there has been a big outcry by all my old friends about my arrogance,” he says, and the excellent Mr. Wolff makes this straight-faced admission both hilarious and charming.

To Adam, living is a grand experiment — an exuberant trying-on of attitudes, ideas and dreamy affectations. That’s part of what being an adolescent is, and Emily and Jenny have those same inclinations. But the girls are far more constricted.

In Adam’s full embrace of life, he boasts to anyone who will listen about his sexual experiences, while Emily, a virgin, gets prank calls from people telling her she’s a slut — a judgment based, it seems, on the size of her chest. The play makes clear, sometimes too heavy-handedly, that that label can land on girls for the way they look or dress or even eat. Appetites that are celebrated in boys and men can be punished in girls and women.

And as any horror film could tell you, the undeserved penalty can be gruesome indeed.